"There are 1,501 volunteer fire departments in Texas, which means that 78 percent of the state’s firefighting forces are made up of men and women who are willing to drop whatever they’re doing and risk their lives for no compensation. For these volunteers—shopkeepers, salespeople, farmhands, mechanics—firefighting isn’t so much a passion as an obligation, one that interrupts their meetings, deals, projects, and conversations, adding a bit of chaos to their routines. Broadly speaking, anyone who lives in a town with a population smaller than 15,000, where municipal coffers are often too limited to fund a professional force, understands this. There are no shifts at the firehouse. There’s no one champing at the bit, no one waiting for that call to come in so the guys can jump in the truck and get to work. Yet the reward for volunteer firefighters, as anyone in the West department could tell you, is the simple satisfaction of protecting their community. No one else is going to put out the grass fire by the side of the road or hose down a neighbor’s house. So they do it. In West, a prospective volunteer must wait for an opening in the department before he can apply. Even then, he is not automatically enlisted. Members vote on whether an applicant fits the force’s needs (specific qualifications such as proximity to the fire station matter greatly), and if he is selected, the new recruit must then undergo training: a week of fire school at Texas A&M, perhaps, or regional instruction on the use of air packs, trucks, and hoses. If he wants to get certified, as almost half the West firefighters are, he’ll continue to take classes. He must also attend the department’s monthly business meetings and drills, which consist of reviewing the plans of attack at area schools, local businesses, or the town’s hotel. Only after a new firefighter shows a firm grasp of the process may he assist in a real emergency. The West Volunteer Fire Department answers about one hundred calls a year, and except for the department’s annual barbecue cook-off, designed to raise a few thousand dollars for classes and equipment, the firefighters go about this work with little fanfare. Theirs is a quiet commitment: at the time of the blaze at the fertilizer plant, West’s firemen had served an average of 10 years each; the two most veteran members, George Nors Sr. and 51-year-old funeral director Robby Payne, had both served for almost 30 years. The members of the force had all grown to rely on one another, especially when they were faced with unpredictable situations. After Robert Snokhous had had to pull a teenager he knew from a fatal car wreck, for instance, he’d turned to Payne for guidance in the grief-stricken days that followed. “Just how am I supposed to continue to do this?” he’d asked. They were connected in other ways too. Joey Pustejovsky, the city secretary, talked every day with Tommy Muska, the mayor, as well as Stevie Vanek, the mayor pro tem, who happened to be an old classmate of Muska’s. Other firefighters were related by marriage or by blood—the Snokhous brothers were cousins with the one female firefighter, Judy Knapek, and George Nors Jr. served alongside his father—while still others had grown up together or now attended the same church or lived within spitting distance of one another. Payne, for one, had married David Maler’s cousin and regularly played golf with Kirk Wines and Muska, who was also his neighbor. And back in 2005, when Muska’s teenage son, Nick, was killed in a horrible automobile accident, it was Payne who’d handled the funeral. Such tangled bonds are a fact of small-town life anywhere, and in West, where neighbors have known one another for so many generations that they can tell you which families tend to serve in the fire department, these connections were a special point of pride. Here, people saw one another at the drug store, at weekend picnics, at baseball games, and, more likely than not, at mass at St. Mary’s Church of the Assumption, which boasted 1,500 parishioners. And, of course, there was Westfest, the town’s annual celebration of all things Czech, when residents reveled in their shared heritage with an abundance of sausage and kolaches and where local girls donned traditional dresses made by hand at Maggie’s Fabric Patch. This familiarity was, in fact, one reason people stayed in West and why young people who’d moved away returned. These prodigals, who might bring out-of-town spouses with them (known as Czech-mates), would likely have been homesick for the fluent Czech spoken among their elders and the casual phrases uttered around town (pivos for “beers,” Jak se máš? for “How are you?”). Now they’d teach their children which residents in town went by the nicknames Pee-Wee and Poopsie, and they’d explain that Jimma Holecek, the slowest driver in town, was an animal lover whose chickens and cows were the most cared-after creatures around. (“If I’m reincarnated as an animal,” his wife was known to say, “I want to belong to Jimma.”) More importantly, they’d talk about dedication—the kind of dedication locals had shown twenty years ago when word spread that Vanek’s nephew needed a liver transplant and the town hosted an auction, a fried-chicken dinner, and bake sales to raise $90,000 for his family. The kind of dedication that meant people attended every baptism and wedding, and every funeral too, marveling at the way the cemetery grass was always neatly mowed, the graves cared for in such a way that even the oldest markers were decorated with flags and flowers. (Local retiree Robert Zahirniak swears that the graves are so well tended that a couple who was visiting West decided to relocate there upon seeing some of the grounds. “You can really judge a town by its cemeteries,” he explained.) Volunteering to fight fires on behalf of the community was a natural extension of this same dedication. Risky though the job was, nobody was too preoccupied with how dangerous it could truly be. No firefighter had died on a call in West since Payne’s wife was a little girl and her dad had had a heart attack while fighting a fire. That was many years ago. The last time West had witnessed any sort of threatening disaster, in fact, was in 1896, at an incident later named the Crash at Crush. In a publicity stunt organized by general passenger agent W. G. Crush and attended by a crowd of 30,000 to 50,000, two railroad engines were sent roaring toward each other. Just before the trains met, the engineers jumped to safety, but the collision was followed by something no one had anticipated: both boilers exploded. Three bystanders were killed; others were burned and injured by flying debris. Mimi Montgomery Irwin, the owner of the Village Bakery, kept a photo of the event on the wall and would often tell the story to customers. “That’s the only thing that has happened here in one hundred and sixty years,” she’d say." -- Katy Vine, "Texas Monthly"
Posted on: Fri, 23 Aug 2013 19:18:17 +0000
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